


deranged snail lesbians: a love story

by Deejaymil



Series: Original Stories by a Bored Australian [12]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Bank Robbers, F/F, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Murder, Non-Linear Narrative, Recreational Drug Use, Snails, and deranged lesbians, essentially the story of gay bonnie and clyde, everyone in this story is a bad person, oh my, this is not a positive bunny
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-31
Updated: 2019-01-31
Packaged: 2019-10-19 23:23:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17611025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deejaymil/pseuds/Deejaymil
Summary: I was quite calm the day that I killed you. Premeditated, they’ll call it, if anyone cares to investigate. I doubt they will.You see, I’m doing the world a favour.





	deranged snail lesbians: a love story

I was quite calm the day that I killed you. Premeditated, they’ll call it, if anyone cares to investigate. I doubt they will. You see, I’m doing the world a favour.

You’re dying now. My vision is clear enough to watch it happen. On your back with sightless eyes watching the flaking ceiling above, the peeling stickers shaped like stars that glow when the lights are off. I wonder if they’re glowing for you despite the sun streaming through the dirty windows. I wonder if you’re remembering all the times you’ve stared at that ceiling before.

When you’re dead, I’ll leave this place, this apartment twenty stories above the ground below. Not via the dirty bedroom window that makes the sunlight spotty and grim and not via the front door that’s long been boarded shut to stop the homeless squatting here, along the needles and the trash and the piles of sickening memories. I’ll leave out the living room window, the one with the rickety fire escape attached. Do you remember the fire escape? Clinging on determinedly to the wall like a snail to a creeping vine, rusted bolts holding it in place and only ever sometimes threatening to fling itself wildly out into the world below. Rusted enough that our fingers were painted orange when we clung on just as grimly and shitty enough that it would cut and bite at our skin if we weren’t careful.

We were never careful.

You’re dying faster now. The room stinks of more than just vagrants’ piss and mould. Now I can smell puke, the vomit that’s collecting in the back of your throat and choking down your airways. You splutter and gasp; your chest heaves three times fast and then slows. Do you remember the lipstick we stole from my babysitter when we were thirteen years old, eleven year ago? It was the same blue as your lips now. And red blush, the same colour as the trickle of blood from the fresh track mark in your arm. I’m not very good. You never bleed when using.

When you die, the smell grows. Human bodies are disgusting when dead.

You’re dead now.

I get up and leave that place, your body already beginning the complicated processes of decomposition at a microscopic level too small for me to see. Leaving via that living room window, the wind whipping at the hair you loved, my bare feet catching painfully on the steel grate of the fire escape as I step outside and close the window behind me. When I look at the hand I’ve used to steady myself on the rail, my fingers are orange. This high up, I don’t look down. I don’t look around—we’ve long learned not to bother with what’s on the horizon. I just look at the wall, and I think of the snails you told me about. Ignoring the sounds of the city choking on itself around me, the horns and the voices and the motors and distantly, so distantly, sirens coming closer.

The cigarette in my pocket is yours and I take it out and light it with a match we stole from the boy you killed. Took from his pocket as he did exactly what you’re doing now: rotted. Filthy human carcasses, just like we’ve always been. My hand is shaking. The filter resists my teeth when I bite to hold it in my mouth, the wind out here always vicious, always chilling. Always kinder than inside. I have until this cigarette is done until I join you, my love.

You see, I’m doing the world a favour—but only so long as I’m not a part of it. Because the world wants you gone, wants you out of it and me too probably, but me?

I love you, not despite that fact that you’re filthy and human and wrong, but because.

And here’s why.

 

I’m eleven years old and there’s a girl on my fire escape.

I can’t see you out there. I can’t see. My eyes are awful and the world around me is a blurry mess of shapeless forms and muted colours. A blessing, you’ll tell me one day. At this point, I can’t see the lack of stars above or the lack of point below. Only what’s within about a metre squared of me, which, incidentally, is the size of the fire escape that my father points to out the window and says, “There’s a fucking faerie out there.” He’s drunk, of course, and he laughs like this is hilarious before waddling off to the bedroom where my mother is folding clothes. The door doesn’t always close behind them, so I hunch into my seat with one hand holding my book on my lap and the other poking skinny fingers into the holes in the fabric. I’m waiting to hear what kind of night this is going to be: if it’s going to be the kind of night where Daddy comes back out all angry and sour with his hands ready and his belt loose at his waist, or if it’s going to be the kind of night where I listen to the strange sounds adults make when they’re hurting each other in a different kind of way.

The bed creaks and groans rhythmically and I decide to go see the faerie instead of staying and listening. At this point, I don’t know what the sounds mean. You’ll teach me, one day, when we’re thirteen and you decide we’re old enough to figure it out on our own.

Daddy tells me later that your mommy is a whore and that’s why you know to do what you do. I think at the time that it’s lucky he doesn’t know about us.

“The fuck do you want?” is the first thing you say to me as I slide the window open and crawl out to stand awkwardly beside you. You’re an indistinct form to my crappy eyes and I squint to make you out a bit better in the glaring sunlight. All copper hair and a sour smile with your lip chewed all over and holes in all your clothes. You smell, I know this, like not washing and cigarette smoke and cheap perfume you’ve probably stolen from your mom. It doesn’t really bother me. My apartment stinks too.

“You’re on _my_ fire escape,” I point out, mostly incorrectly. Your apartment exits onto this section too, but I don’t know that at the time. “I should be asking you the same question.”

You snort and toss that copper hair, long now but you’ll cut it off soon to make me feel better about cutting my own off. I’ll grow it back once I stop needing to be uglier than I am. You never do. The day I kill you, years from now, it will still be straight and spiky around your ears.

“Tell you what,” you say, sliding your hand across the rail. I listen rather than watch you do that, the scrape of your skin on rusted metal. “Sit out here with me and I’ll share my fags.”

“Fags?”

“Smokes.” A packet is shoved under my nose and you shake them about. Red. The packet is red. I remember that. “Unless you’re too much of a baby to smoke, huh?”

“I’ve never smoked,” I admit. “But you can teach me if you want.”

And you do.

 

We’re seventeen and we just held up a convenience store. Got clean away, of course we did, because—as you love to point out—I’m a fucking genius for schemes and we haven’t been caught yet. There’s a cool two grand spread out on the backseat between us; I’m smoking lazily and you’re shooting up. Legs tossed up over the driver’s seat, bare foot bobbing along with the electronic beat on the radio, it would be a pristine summer’s day, but we’re still crammed into this deadbeat city like sardines in a can, parked down an alley with a dumpster hiding our car from view. The sun doesn’t touch here and it’s cold.

“We gotta get you a gun, baby,” you say to me with the same lazy smile you’ve always loved giving me, a black gap visible from the tooth you lost when we were fifteen and you picked a fight with a boy three times your size just because he touched my tit and called me pretty. “You’d be fucking gorgeous with a piece on your hip.”

“I don’t like guns, George,” I warn you, watching you undo the belt on your arm as the needle slips free. “You know I don’t like hurting people. It’s the snails all over again.”

“I never hurt the snails,” you say, crawling over and slipping atop me, your weight just as slim as mine and maybe even less because, even though you don’t care about anything, you care about me and let me eat the lion’s share of our food. We kiss and you taste like the cheap ale we’ve been drinking. “You never let me hurt the snails.”

I never did, but sometimes I wonder if you hurt them anyway, taking advantage of how blind I was then.

 

The third month after we met, you told me about the snails. At eleven, I’d never seen a snail. Snails come out when its rain, you said, eating through wet leaves and dewy grass. I’d never seen a garden either, or a tree that wasn’t crooked and thin. Green, certainly not, unless you’re counting the packaging on my mom’s favourite beer. They fascinate me, these snails.

The next day you’re waiting on the fire escape for me—we only ever hang out out here, because neither of us want to go back inside to what waits within—and you have a book on your knee. It’s your brother’s: the name ‘Liam Epps’ is written neatly on the inside cover, right across from the page titling the book ‘A Tale of Gastropods’.

“Books are dumb,” you say—you hate them because Liam loves them and everything Liam loves you find repulsive. “You might as well have this one.”

“He won’t mind?” I ask, and you laugh and laugh and laugh. Later, I’ll find out he did mind, he minded very much, but right now I’m reassured. The book is as wonderful as I’d imagined, pressed close to my nose so my struggling eyes can rip out every tidbit of information and sink it into my brain forevermore. I love snails. I still love snails.

I ask you, “Imagine what it would be like if you could carry your home everywhere?” and you laugh some more, a fag in your mouth and your bare toes cut and bleeding from the fire escape. There are bruises on your wrists much different from the ones across my ass, they tell a different story I don’t understand yet. You think I’m ridiculous because you know home is a concept for real people, not us. We’re the city’s vermin, the poor, the filthy. Stacked up high in this hollow building filled with every kind of broken life. And you and I, Mia and George, we’re just two more rats ready to tell our fucked-up stories—we don’t know that then. I’m getting distracted.

All you say is, “I can’t imagine wanting to carry something forever,” even though, in the end, what we have lasts the rest of your life.

 

You’re twenty-three and this is when I begin to realise you’re always going to be the person telling stories about pouring salt on snails. I loved that when we were younger, how dangerous and untouchable you were. Unpredictable. Cold. Hollow as the building we lived in. You broke nests from the fire escape to watch the baby birds fall and sometimes you’d hold your cigarette to my arm because you loved the way it burned me. I still have those scars on this day, my fingers tapping against each browned circle dotting my arm like the track marks do yours, my eyes watching you kill your brother.

Liam, Liam, Liam. He had it coming.

I’m smoking as you choke him, his brown eyes on me and so open I can see our past in them. Because, at that point, I think everyone should have one last beautiful thing to look upon, I don’t look away.

He called me beautiful once.

I guess he probably called you the same.

 

You killed him partially because he had it coming and partially because of this day, when I was fifteen. This is before we run away together. Me and you, we’ve been dating for a year and fucking for two at this point, when I’m alone on the fire escape and your window slides open but it’s not you that climbs out. It’s Liam Liam Liam—you never say his name once when you have to, your mouth always twisted in disgust as you recite it like you’re striking him with every word—and he smiles at me sweetly. I don’t know any better, so I smile back.

George, you never warned me.

He’s nineteen and cute. The kind of cute that feels normal and real and not like what we have, there’s no cigarette burns or salted snails in his smile. It’s a little crooked and goes right to his eyes, his hair so much like yours silky and flicked back out of his face. I like his smile. It looks like yours. I like his mind too; he’s bookish and clever and taught you to play chess. Secretly, I wish I had a brother who’d teach me to play chess too. At sixteen, he got into college early on a full scholarship and everyone tells him he’s “going places”. He’s not.

And he’s cute and smart and looks just like you but without any of the danger, even to my shitty eyes, so I have sex with him that day. When I tell you, you’ll hit me and scream and spit. It’s the angriest I’ll ever see you, but I never hold it against you. After all, when he was fucking me he was gentle and kind, which you later tell me in excruciating detail is completely different to how he is when he’s fucking you.

Liam Liam Liam.

He really had it coming.

 

There’s a gun in my hand the day we rob the bank. I’m anxious and high-strung, my heart hammering in my chest and my hands clammy around the grip. You teach me to hold it and you teach me to shoot, even though I’m an awful shot and I’d probably panic if needed anyway.

“Don’t aim it at me,” you tease, grabbing the barrel when I accidentally swing around to face you and almost hit you in the arm. “Not unless you mean it.”

“My finger isn’t on the trigger,” I argue, using one hand to fix the glasses you bought me and remembering again how amazing it is to clearly see the world, to clearly see you. The gap in your teeth and lines around your eyes and the same crooked smile that Liam had.

“It doesn’t have to be.” Your voice is cool and sharp as you step closer with your hand still curled around the barrel, pulling it up and pressing the eye to your cheek. You stare me down. I begin to shake. I can’t let go—your eyes tell me clearly that you want me to hang on, and I’m vividly aware of exactly where the trigger is and that the weapon is loaded and that if that trigger gets pulled the hollow point will rip through brain and bone and leave nothing left but a mess on this world I don’t know how to clean up. “You’re scared, see. You’re not even holding the trigger and you’re scared of it going off.”

“And you’re not?”

“No.” You smile. You’ve never feared dying. “I know you won’t hurt me. You’re a mouse, baby. A little mouse, my little mouse, and you couldn’t hurt a flea.”

That’s not true. I know this now. You don’t.

I carry that gun that day and I don’t shoot anyone. You do. You kill a security guard with your gun, with a bang and a neat little hole in his chest that leaks out all his life while I watch and wonder if he suffered more than the snails you killed did. But I rationalise his death: we have enough money finally to get out of this city with, and you only hurt him for a reason. Like a rabid dog or Liam.

I’m still your mouse.

 

At twelve, you teach me to build houses for snails on the fire escape. We use cereal boxes and popsicle sticks and make more houses than there are snails in the world, or so it feels. It doesn’t rain up here so we don’t need to worry about them getting wet, but we do tie them down tight to the grating with little twists of wire.

You tell me about the snails when I voice my doubts that the houses will ever be used up here. You tell me they crawl up the walls just outside the fire escape, leaving shiny trails of snail slime behind them. You describe their beautiful shells and their small faces. You even lean over the edge and reach for them, calling back, “Don’t worry, Mia, I’ll get you one to keep!”

You’re so sincere about their existence that I believe you completely, squinting and thinking that maybe that there, that shadow on the wall… that could be a snail. It really could be anything, couldn’t it?

I love you for this. That year was horrible, with Mom leaving and Daddy getting rougher than ever, all his heart going with her, and I guess that year was horrible for you too, with what I now know Liam was doing. Night after night with the light off and those glow in the dark stars gleaming overhead: you’ll tell me one day how much you loathed those stars because they were all you had to focus on throughout.

“Did you know,” you say slowly, touching at my snail house with your scabby toe, “that if you pour salt on snails, they die?”

What a horrible thing to say. I stare at you with horror in my eyes, expressing just how awful that is, but you stare back blankly. That’s just how you are, my emotions tend to mystify you. You love me because I make you feel good, but that good is pretty unquantifiable for you. How many nights did we spend together after we ran away with you trying to explain how impossible to understand my feelings are? You’ve always been on the outside looking in. I guess that’s why I don’t freak out at you when you talk about salting the snails, about how fascinating their bubbling and hissing is as they die.

Instead, I explain about how important it is that you never hurt something unless you have to, like shooting a rabid dog or getting a pet put down to stop it suffering. And you seem to understand.

You promise not to hurt them and return to telling me about their beautiful shells and how the sunlight catches them just so.

I don’t know if I believe you.

 

I need you. My dependency on you is complete. From my eyes which you gave me the day we ran away from home, stealing all your parents’ money and using it to buy me glasses and a new lease on life, to my heart which has only ever really belonged to you. From the day we were eleven years old, we were fated to this moment. All the peoples’ lives we’ve ruined, all the lives we’ve ended. They talk about us, you know, on their TVs and their radios. The FBI calls us armed and dangerous and we are, I guess.

But I’ve never hurt anyone who didn’t deserve it, not even a snail, and I like to believe you haven’t either.

“Can we leave this city now?” I ask you three days after the bank robbery. We’re squatting: we abandoned the car, and you’ve bought us both ice cream as a treat. Eating it out of the container feels like a decadent indulgence, especially since you forgot spoons and so we’re just using our hands. “You promised we’d leave the city when we have enough money, and I’m sick of living on the street.”

“Baby, I promise,” you tell me, ice cream on your lip and gun tucked in the waistband of your skirt. “We’re leaving. I just gotta score and wait for the heat to go down, then we’re out of here. Where do you want to go?”

The country. Somewhere green and alive, somewhere where it rains. I want to walk outside in the morning and move snails from the sidewalk, back into the green where they belong. I want to make more snail houses but this time to see the occupants inside them, now that I finally can. I want to leave the city and its fire escapes and Liams behind.

You promise me that’s where we’re going soon, so soon. You promise me.

But then the boy finds us.

 

Do you remember all the firsts we had on that fire escape? We fell in love out there, we kissed out there. We got high for the first time out there. You showed me how easy it was to bleed out there, cutting yourself for my amusement. We hid out there, from Liam and from my dad and from everything rotten in this world. We talked about how broken it all was and how much it owed us. We talked about what we’d do to enact our revenge; we talked about how we’d burn it all down together. I taught you what was happening the first month you started to bleed; you sneak me tampons your mom would buy you because my daddy didn’t want to know. We talked about the snails that you promised you could see, the ones I try to touch but can never quite reach.

We live out there. And then, when we’re fifteen, we leave that place and never really live again.

We only come back to die.

 

You’re dead now. I left you there choked on your own vomit in the room where your brother first fucked you at ten years old, staring at those same terrible stars. I guess leaving you watching them was my way of telling you that I hate you just as much as I love you, that you don’t deserve that final beautiful thing. I hate you for lying to me and I hate you for killing the boy who didn’t do anything wrong and I hate you for liking what you did to him so much. I guess I also hate myself, because maybe, just maybe, you’ve always been like that but I just needed you too much to realise.

I think I hate you the most because I realise now that I’m just like you. I always have been. Maybe worse, in some ways, because I feel things but I still follow you happily when you try to sear the world. I hate you because of how easy you were to manipulate, right from when we were eleven years old. I never needed to carry a gun because you were the weapon I created.

When you cut yourself for my amusement, it was because I gave you the blade and told you to do it. When you burned me with your cigarette, it was because I lit the match for you. When you shot the first person, I loaded the gun and told you to go. I was the one who led Liam to you, kissing his lying mouth and telling him I’d make him feel good if he followed me to where you waited. And I laughed watching you kill the one I’ve always fantasised about letting you kill, my father, because I knew from the day I met you that you’d be fucking fantastic with a weapon in your hands.

And I was right, wasn’t I? I was always right. That was us. Georgina, the psycho, and Mia the studious little mouse. They always said one of us would go wrong.

You probably wouldn’t have gone this wrong without me.

He died screaming while we watched, you and I, hand in hand, and we made sure to kiss before his eyes closed so that would be the last beautiful thing he saw. We were fifteen years old and, the day before, he’d caught us fucking and told us he’d throw us from the fire escape if he caught us again, the little queers we were. Little dykes, he said. You hated that. You hated him.

I used that.

Thank you for killing him. I’m sorry it made you into the person you are now, dead and rotting in a boarded-up apartment filled with nothing but misery and the ghosts of your family and mine. I’m sorry I let that happen.

My cigarette is gone. I let the metal gridding cut my fingers one last time as I look back to the window behind me and, then, the walls around it. They’re empty, just like your eyes. There’s nothing beautiful here, not for me or for you or all the broken lives we left behind us.

I lean forward and let go. I’m quite calm. Our paths were always leading to this moment. We were born, we loved, and now we’re dead.

And I never even saw a single snail.


End file.
